There's a world outside of SEO agencies/consultants. In-house SEOs use tools like this all of the time. Do we? No, but we wanted to audit our process more than the tools themselves. It's competitive research and we had a couple of new ideas as a result. This makes us and our tools better and as we mentioned in the post, none of these tools can replace the experienced eye of a SEO. At the same time, we can't take on everyone that contacts us, so for the more technical leads that just need to cleanup specific things, these tools can helpful and if they free them up to focus their budget on other areas like link development, content creation or social media, I think that's great.

Anyone that wants to work on SEO themselvees will quickly and easily find many tools out there. This piece is helpful in sorting out some of the differences. If you're really doing SEO Audits without the benefit of tools that collect data, wow, more power to you... guess you have lots of extra time to spare doing things manually that tools already provide.

But to answer above "why would SEOs give credence...", having tools does not mean you know what to do with them or how to sort through the information they provide and know what is important. It also does not mean that the tools replace SEO consultation, because they do not IMO. In fact, I have a current client that uses one of the tools above and hired us specifically because they need more expertise than the tool can provide... and we use that same tool...along with three others. We are also working on one or more audits during any given week and our audits take 3+ weeks to complete, even with "tools".